杏吧原创

Keep your eye on the road (Image: Solstock/Getty)

TOYS, toys, toys. We are deluged with new playthings that make ever more demands for our attention 鈥� many of them digital. How can we focus on anything true or beautiful amid the twitter and chirp of such constant, almost toddler-like demands?

Other writers have excoriated the distractions of ubiquitous technology and advertising. But Matthew Crawford seeks a deep philosophical perspective. He has a background in physics and political science, and is now at the University of Virginia鈥檚 Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. In The World Beyond Your Head, he explores how we got to what he calls a 鈥渃risis of attention鈥�. His starting onslaught is no less challenging a task than an assault on the 鈥淓nlightenment self鈥�, because, it seems, it is the isolated self that permits distraction.

Immanuel Kant is frequently taken to be the epitome of the 18th-century philosophical Enlightenment, and Crawford blames him for constructing its notion of the self as an isolated being for whom true knowledge can arise only from solo enquiry.

He spreads the blame to the 17th century 鈥� to John Locke, the font of liberal thought, and to Ren茅 Descartes, who said that the only thing he couldn鈥檛 doubt was that there was something, a self, doing the doubting.

Oddly missing is any discussion of another key Enlightenment figure: Adam Smith, who theorised capitalism as an economy of atomised individuals making rational choices in a social vacuum. 鈥淔reedom鈥� and 鈥渃hoice鈥� are the mantras of capitalism. Even though 鈥渨e often assume that diversity is a natural upshot of free choice鈥�, Crawford says, 鈥渢he market ideal of choice鈥� tends toward a monoculture of human types: the late modern consumer self.鈥� As an example, he describes how lobbyists for casino gambling 鈥渢ap into the deep psychology of autonomy鈥� to make it seem that submitting to the engineered attention-grabbing of gambling is a human right.

All this introduces us to one of Crawford鈥檚 key proposals for dealing with the crisis: to shift our focus from the lonesome atomised individual to truly shared attention. The current fashion for the 鈥渨isdom of crowds鈥� is not true sharing, but rather the market mining individuals. As he writes, 鈥渢here is a lot more money to be made as an aggregator of 鈥榗ontent鈥� than as a producer of it鈥�.

聯Crawford proposes shifting our focus from lonesome Enlightenment individual to shared attention聰

Crawford鈥檚 core message is that we should stop focusing on ourselves and move towards true sharing. 鈥淚nvolve your ass, your mind will follow,鈥� he says. He commends to us the 鈥渇low鈥� he feels when riding motorbikes, when his derri猫re is deeply involved in his need to pay attention. He feels it too in his workshop, making motorbike parts and solving problems with others. In particular, he says, we should value education as a face-to-face apprenticeship in the ways of investigating and of making, through attention shared in person. He gives as an example learning to build a pipe organ, with the person who has to repair it in 400 years鈥� time in mind.

You will find a much gentler and more literary exploration of the ills of distraction in the musings of Laurence Scott, who teaches creative writing at Arcadia University in London.

In The Four-Dimensional Human, Scott reaches out not into space-time, but into the 20th-century literary imagination鈥檚 grasping for something outside the mundane three dimensions.

His account of what is becoming of us is often beautiful even if unnerving at times, such as when he evokes the web pages that come alive on anniversaries of their owners鈥� deaths. It is certainly worth our attention.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淭ake a look at your self鈥�